In English a noun can be used as an adjective to describe another noun in the sentence. Take flat screen TV as an example; what's its German translation?
Ein flachbildschirm Fernseher
Ein flachbildschirmes Fernseher
Does the noun acting as adjective need a suffix, or is it noun-noun order just like in English? Examples: bean soap, a five-year-old child, etc.
No. However, you can use a "Nominalkompositum" (nominal composition) to achieve the same effect.
Example:
Flachbildfernseher
The first part of this compound word is called the Determinans ("Flachbild"), it determines some kind of attribute about the following part, the Determinatum (Fernseher).
Notice that "Flachbild" is a compound word in itself, but this time the word has been formed using an adjective and a noun ("flach" and "Bild") rather than two nouns.
Fun fact: if you come across one of those impossibly long German words, it's likely to be a nominal composite:
Which, in English, could be rendered by the equivalent noun phrases:
It is worth distinguishing between noun phrases and nominal composition because English uses nominal composition too; even though noun-noun compound words, like "fingerprint", are quite rare.
I'm going to go ahead and throw some controversal opinion into the ring by saying:
English and German are pretty much the same. Only that in English you write it as two words.
One word or two words - that is pure convention. Both languages are "head right", so the descriptor usually comes before the described. One instance of that are adjectives, another the compound nouns/noun chains. Ultimately I would argue that English has compounds too. It just doesn't want to admit it.
secretary of defense - not a compound
Verteidigungsminister - compound
defense secretary - compound in denial
If you want to see a language that REALLY doesn't have compounds, then look at French (or other Romance languages). They are "head left" and they use a preposition for everything.
The premise of your question is skewed. The first noun of such an English noun phrase does not describe the following noun. Rather, the two nouns together form a compound noun whose meaning may or may not be derivable from its components. I have written a lengthy answer in German on the topic.
For reasons that are probably historical, English often prefers to write compounds as two words (i.e. with a space between the components) but sometimes it does choose to write compounds with a hyphen or as one word. French most typically chooses to use prepositions to connect two components into a compound. Finnish and German typically write compounds as one words without separator (although Finnish does separate by hyphens if two identical vowels would otherwise meet — this is based in the phonetic spelling it uses). And finally there are languages that do not have a notion of ‘interword space’ in writing and thus just add symbols onto each other because they always do (e.g. Chinese).
